May 6, 2008

Interesting news this week — along with the release of Project Indiana, Sun is also providing limited access to OpenSolaris images running on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. I’m keen to try it out, but at the same time I’m a little skeptical about the whole thing.

I have high hopes for Project Indiana. After working with Joyent Accelerators, there are a lot of things I like about Solaris (the service manager, ZFS, DTrace, etc.) and a lot of things I don’t like (awkward package management, very DIY for relatively simple things).

Indiana running on EC2 instances is a good way to introduce people to the platform, but it’s a bummer you have to register with Sun and get their permission before jumping in the pool. I hope the waiting list isn’t too long. I’m itching to play.

Hopefully Indiana on EC2 is lean, mean, and easy to get started with … but I have my doubts that it will be a replacement for my current Ubuntu AMIs. I don’t have any super custom configurations, I just don’t think EC2 isn’t the kind of environment where Solaris really shines — EC2 is lots of little servers, not a big box with a bunch of cores and spindles. Regardless, I’m an optimist, and I look forward to being proven wrong.

I’m waiting on access to the Project Indiana AMIs. I’ll report back as soon as I get my feet wet.

Update: I’ve been accepted to the beta program, but I don’t think I can do a test drive until this weekend. More information then!

April 14, 2008

I received a friendly e-mail this morning from Amazon, announcing persistent storage for EC2 instances. From the looks of it, the storage behaves like NAS — it exists independent of the instances you’re using, and can be mounted whenever you like. Not bad. I’m interested to see what the IO performance is like.

Other features include:

* Snapshots, to back up the storage to S3.
* Multiple volumes per instance.
* Shows up as a block device on the instance, so any filesystem can be used.

Persistent storage is in limited private beta right now, but according to the announcement it should be publicly available “later this year.”

March 27, 2008

Amazon announced Elastic IP Addresses for their Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service this morning, which removes one of the biggest hurdles for deploying web sites on the service. Previously, customers had no control over the IP addresses assigned to their EC2 instances, a frustrating situation for anyone wanting to reliably point a domain into the cloud.

Elastic IP Addresses solve this issue in a rather elegant way, by assigning a static IP address to your EC2 account, and providing a mechanism for routing that address to any of your EC2 instances. This system provides a reliable address for DNS, and enables failover and takeover features for applications with high availability requirements.